Love, and What Comes After
by herworship429
Summary: Somewhere along the way, he'd become a ghost to her, and it was time to move on.


To those of you who still don't think it's just a _little_ naive and childish to expect Bruce and Betty to get their oft-interrupted happily-ever-after in the movie universe, I apologize for this and suggest you hit the back button before I ruin any of your illusions. Go on, take your time. Know that there is no shame in purposeful ignorance (at least in this arena). If you choose not to shatter your perceptions of this fake reality, I, nor anyone else, can judge you for it. While you decide if you want to do this or not...

I don't own any Marvel properties, I am only borrowing them for our (hopefully) mutual entertainment. So don't sue me please.

As this is sort of a pre-break-up thing, there's not really much shipping going on, though there is a teensy bit of Bruce/Natasha. Maybe. If you squint, and are looking for that sort of thing. Also, I know Bruce probably wouldn't be so quick to think of the tower as 'Home' and the Avengers as a family of sorts, but bear with me.

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... and now, if you're still here, I hope you enjoy this. Or that it at least made you think.

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It was a strange and unsettling thing to realize that 'home' has ceased to be _home_. It wasn't, Bruce Banner was beginning to realize, anything to do with the place itself; Culver University was still Culver University. Nothing short of the place being obliterated off the map would change that. And nothing of significance had changed in the years since he had last been here. The brick and stone campus buildings, the little wooden bungalows in the surrounding neighborhoods, the lawns and stately oaks, none of it looked any different. The library overpass had been repaired, the grass trampled by tanks and torn up by shrapnel replaced, all the signs of the Hulk's display of righteous fury neatly erased. But if Bruce was the Hulk, and the Hulk was Bruce, did that mean that all signs of the man had been erased along with the monster?

He supposed he was about to find out. He took a deep breath and made a beeline across the field, ducking his head and trying to avoid notice more out of habit than any real fear of being recognized. He was no longer wanted by the police or the military; SHIELD had seen to that, in exchange for the help he'd provided in New York. But then again, there were the 'other interested parties' Natasha had spoken of in India to be concerned with, and old habits died long, slow deaths for men like him, so he hid behind a tree for ten minutes, watching the people that came and went from Betty's building. It was a mixture of students, teachers and visitors; some weighed down with backpacks, headphones sprouting from their ears like some sort of strange mechanical growth, most of them staring at the screens of their phones and mp3 players, others having lively discussions with their friends, professors stopping to say hello to a colleague, to talk with a student, a young man with a map asking for directions… this steady rhythm had been the backbeat of his life for so many years, and it was a shock to realize that he was no longer a part of it. He didn't understand it anymore, did not fit into it. He was a stranger in the only place he had ever really called home, and the chill of that revelation shook him to his core.

He had always thought he would go home, eventually. He would find a cure and get his life back, pick things up right where they had left off, but now he understood the cold, hard truth was that this had always been a foolish fantasy. His life had changed completely; _he_ had changed. This wasn't home anymore. It was just a place he had once lived. And Betty…

Betty was walking down the steps. She looked the same as she always had. Her hair was cut the same way, with the slash of bangs across her forehead, the rest of it falling well past her shoulders; she wore the red high-heels she always complained hurt her feet, and he wondered (as he always did when she wore them) why women bothered with their fashionable torture devices if they were only going to complain about them all day; she carried a bag stuffed with papers (he realized that it was _his_ bag, the old leather one he'd used when he was teaching) and a cup of coffee… he was suddenly reminded of the last time he had come here. He had stood behind the exact same tree, watched her walk out of the same building and sit down on the same retaining wall; and then he'd watched her check her phone like she was doing now, and look up in his direction. She hadn't seen him then, lurking in the shadows like some demented stalker, but this time was different. This time she looked up and strait at him. He could see her mouth form his name as she stood up, her coffee cup crashing to the ground, and he fought the instinct to turn and run. He was here for this, he told himself firmly, trying to convince himself of it's truth; he was here for her, this time.

Then again, he'd rather not do this in front of a crowd of curious onlookers. So when she ran up to him and tried to pull him into a hug, tried to kiss him, he let that be his excuse for pulling away just a hair too soon. He'd hoped she wouldn't notice; he should have known better. She had never missed much when it came to him, and a frown now graced her pretty face. She looked at him with eyes full of concern and asked him what was wrong in the breathy voice that used to make him go weak at the knees with joy. No longer. Now, it irritated him, because she always sounded like she was talking to a child, to something small and weak and in need of her protection, and he resented being treated like he was fragile and helpless. She knew damn well how not-fragile and not-helpless he was when he needed to be. He couldn't voice any of these things, though, because he was still trying to get a hang of this strutting-not-tip-toeing thing, and it was still Betty, and she was supposed to be the love of his life, and there were certain social conventions that demanded to be upheld, so he just shook his head evasively and locked his eyes on the concrete of the sidewalk under his feet.

"I saw on the news, what happened in New York, I-" she was staring at him now with those eyes full of concern and pity and a million other things he couldn't hope to identify, and it was making him uncomfortable. She wasn't looking at him any differently, he supposed; still that sort of awestruck expression, as if she couldn't quite believe he was really here, as if she was afraid he would disappear again, gone like a puff of smoke on the wind. And maybe that was the problem; Betty hadn't changed at all, anymore than Culver had, but Bruce was not the same man who had left her in the ruins of Harlem. He was a ghost to her, he realized dimly. He no longer really existed for her; he was a vague idea of the man she had once thought she knew so well, a living memory that might flit off again at any moment. And he _would_ run again, because that's what he was doing here, saying goodbye. If he were a stronger man, he'd have forgone this little excursion; if he were a stronger man, he'd have the courage to let her go with the rest of his past.

Was it wrong that it was only now, now when he was there and so was she, and there was nothing in between them, nothing really to stop them, that it occurred to him that he was no longer in love with her? That he might never have really loved her the way he thought he had? When it had started, he couldn't have said, but maybe it had been the night before the experiment, when she begged him not to do it, told him what an idiot he was for putting his life in such jeopardy for something as stupid as trying to please her father. He hadn't listened; he'd been too wrapped up in his own head to listen to her. And what man who claimed to be as desperately in love with a woman as he had thought himself in love with Betty did that?

Maybe it had been the moment when he chose his research over her.

And after, while he was on the run, left alone with his inner monster, he just wanted something to hold onto. He needed a goal, needed a reason to keep on going, exhausting every line of thought he could come up with to find a cure. Looking back at it now, now that he was removed from the emotions of the time, he realized it wasn't Betty herself that he had been so desperate for. She represented his old life; represented all he had lost when the experiment went wrong. He was in love with the idea of her; he was in love with the idea of being in love, of not being alone as he had been for so long, of having someone to protect, someone to protect him. He still wanted those things that came along with the idea of Betty Ross, but he was starting to understand that he didn't want the reality of Betty anymore.

He no longer belonged to this place, and these people, and suddenly he was standing there without a clue as to what he should say. All he could think was that he wished one of the others had come with him; Tony, perhaps, with his abrasive charm and arsenal of effortless jokes, or Steve, who always seemed to know just the right thing to say to fix everything. No… no, he realized, he wanted Natasha. He wanted her to interrupt with a mission, even if it was a fake one, to make up some excuse, to divert the attention away from him, and give him the time to work out the swirling mess of emotions currently battling in his mind. He wanted her to slip her arm through his and pretend to be his new girlfriend, because maybe that would be easier than trying to explain any of his thoughts to Betty. He had never been particularly eloquent, not unless he was talking about his work, and certainly not when he was talking to Betty. He had never really been able to communicate his feelings to her. Everyone looked at her as the perfect yin to his yang, the only one who had ever really understood him, but she hadn't, not really. He had settled for the closest he thought he was ever going to get to love and understanding and mutual respect, and then suddenly he had become an entirely different man, and there was no way in hell she would ever be able to relate to him now, not with the new-found understanding he had reached with his wilder half.

He belonged with his own kind; with the billionaire-geniuses that run on batteries, with the Norse gods made flesh, with the super-soldiers and the super-spies. Because they were the only ones who could remotely understand him anymore, and he suddenly was rethinking his plan to run off to parts unknown. He'd miss Tony's biting sarcasm and nearly-unsurpassed genius; he'd miss arguing about sports with Clint on his days off; he'd miss Steve's drop-in visits, listening to his stories about how strange and wonderful he found the modern world. He'd miss Thor's random appearances on Earth, and the mildly-destructive drinking contests that always ensued when Clint or Tony insisted they could hold their own with the god of thunder. He'd miss Natasha, who was so often the only one who could coax him out of his own mind, because even though they had almost nothing in common, they understood each other on a level they shared with no one else.

He no longer belonged here, and he no longer belonged to Betty, but he had no idea how to tell her that, so he just smiled weakly and shrugged, letting her lead him away to the refuge that was no longer a refuge. He'd work up the courage to tell her the truth over a slice of pepperoni pizza, and then he'd go back to New York and explain that his plans had changed; he'd see if Tony was maybe okay with him sticking around after all.

It was time to move on, for both their sakes. So he would tell her the truth, and then he'd go home.

Finally.

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Reviews are nice if you feel like it. But I have no cookies for you if you do. Just so you're forewarned. :)


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